as he forecasts a ‘promising’ season ahead
Following an encouraging first weekend to the 2011 Formula Renault UK Championship during which his results palpably failed to reflect his evident potential, Graduate Cup leader Jordan King has declared himself bullish about his prospects for the remainder of the season.
As he embarks upon his maiden full campaign of car racing this year, Jordan headed to Brands Hatch feeling very well-prepared off the back of an extremely solid winter testing programme, towards the end of which he had rarely featured outside of the top three. He was, he acknowledged, fired-up and ready to roll.
“Going into the race weekend, I was feeling confident after testing that we would be quick,” confirmed the talented young Warwickshire star. “Although it is a comparatively small grid in Formula Renault UK this year, the calibre of the drivers is very high – but I didn’t feel we had anything particularly to worry about.”
The 17-year-old BRDC Rising Star went on to underline that conviction by lapping second and fourth-fastest in Friday practice, dialling himself into Brands’ Indy Circuit layout pretty swiftly and proving to be right in the mix.
Unfortunately, a set-up adjustment ahead of qualifying on Saturday inadvertently backfired as the track conditions changed and unexpectedly went away from the Manor Competition quartet. Although Jordan caught the eye with lap times that were ultra-consistent, they were not, sadly, ultra-quick.
Confessing to perhaps not getting it all 100 per cent nailed himself, it was a combination of factors that shifted the Stoneleigh-based speed demon onto the back foot and facing a distinctly uphill battle from thereon in. With overtaking at a real premium around the short-and-tight, 45-second Indy lap bereft of any heavy-braking zones worthy of the name – and with the lack of opportunities exacerbated by the Formula Renault’s sheer aerodynamic grip – from seventh and ninth on the starting grid for the two races, Sunday would be a challenging day.
“I don’t think we collectively got everything together quite right in qualifying,” he conceded. “We made some small alterations, but they unfortunately took us in the wrong direction. The track had changed between practice and qualifying – it was a little bit ‘greener’ and greasier – and it didn’t seem to suit the car quite as well as the previous day. I was disappointed with my grid positions, and I knew the races were going to be difficult from there and that it would be tough to make up much ground.
“In race one, I got a good start and tried to go up the inside of another driver into the first corner, but I backed out of it a little bit when he started to come across on me. In hindsight, that was a mistake because it cost me time and one of my team-mates was able to get past me – and that was pretty much it as far as any action was concerned! Everybody was within a tenth of a second or so of each other, so you could be a tenth faster than the driver ahead, but you were never going to get past.
“In the second race, the driver directly in front of me stalled on the grid and I had to go round him, which slowed me down and meant I couldn’t attack anybody into the first corner. Then going into Druids, the driver ahead had left the door open so I went to the inside, but he quickly closed the door again which left me trapped. One of my team-mates managed to get around the outside, which put him on the inside line for the following corner – so after all that, I ended up finishing where I had started!”
In what were in truth a brace of entirely insipid encounters with nary an overtaking manoeuvre in sight, Jordan took the chequered flag respectively eighth and ninth, but competitive lap times – fifth-quickest in race one and sixth-fastest in race two – hinted that his outright pace had been far greater than his finishing positions suggested. Nonetheless, the results were enough to place the Princethorpe College student seventh in the early title standings and best-placed ‘rookie’ as the leader of the Graduate Cup.
“Our speed in the races was actually very good,” he affirmed. “It’s just so hard to overtake around a circuit like that, and as it’s such a short lap, you can’t really do very much. It was good experience to get under my belt, though, which I can take forward to the next meeting.
“I’m happy that we’re in the ballpark pace-wise – we didn’t finish where we did due to a lack of speed – but I was just so disappointed that qualifying didn’t go well, because that meant we weren’t able to show what we could really do. It was a shame that we couldn’t convert our potential into at least a top five finish, because we were definitely fast enough to do that – but it’s looking promising for the rest of the season.”
As he focuses his attentions now on seconds-out, round two at Donington Park later this month, the Hugo Boss brand ambassador is targeting a top five qualifying performance and at least one podium finish. On the evidence of their form at Brands Hatch, it is a goal that Jordan and Manor look eminently capable of achieving.
